Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on July 1, 2024 | 29 Comments
This is something of a placeholder post, with four miscellaneous items on the general theme of looking back to the past and forward to the future, and then finishing with some questions for regular commenters at the end.
So, looking back (and forward) … well, first, the first anniversary of the publication of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future passed last week. As previously signalled, I’m shifting my attention from the themes of that book to other projects, but I’ll be posting a retrospective about the book and a couple of follow up posts on specific themes from it here soon. Partly this is to mark the anniversary and then help put the book to bed, but it’s also because a few critical commentaries relating to the book have come my way recently that are a little more interesting than earlier critiques. So I’d like to chew on those a bit.
Second, on Saturday, I went to a great conference in London on spiritual ecology at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. In keeping with my looking forward/looking back theme, it gave me plenty of food for thought in terms of my own personal and intellectual trajectory. I’ve long argued that the current global meta-crisis is essentially a cultural or spiritual crisis, even though I’ve never been an especially spiritual or religiously oriented person. It was excellent to hear people speaking eloquently to that theme out of thought traditions different to my usual frames of reference.
Dekila Chungyalpa, one of the keynote speakers, stressed the importance of understanding that the climate crisis and the wider global meta-crisis of which it’s a part is the product of an ongoing colonialism. I agree with that, and I hope my writing has contributed in some way to developing that understanding.
René August, another keynote, also talked about colonialism from her South African perspective, while emphasizing the need for people to create stories that can hold us together in the present moment. This led into a discussion about (some of) we white people’s feelings of guilt over colonialism. I liked René’s take on that: we shouldn’t ask people who’ve been at the sharp end of it to reassure us and help assuage that guilt – instead, we should seek connection, and find other, better stories to tell about ourselves.
René made two other remarks that particularly landed with me. The first was that if, metaphorically, we run out of path and have no obvious route forward where others have already trodden, the work of storytelling in that moment is to look back and learn where we’ve come from. The second was that we must ask what current stories need to be disrupted.
The way I’ve manifested these points in my writing about agrarian localism is as follows. While colonialism has been unleashed most devastatingly by European powers and their offshoots onto people in other parts of the world, and also within their own peripheries, it was also unleashed by those powers on their own populations in the form of expansionary governmental power and the search for endless economic increase. A better story we can tell about ourselves in a country like Britain is the need for us to reclaim local economic agency and sufficiency, which could contribute to other people elsewhere achieving that too.
This new story involves looking back and learning where we came from – learning about how we came into the story of colonialism and endless increase, and what other options are available. The looking back isn’t grounded in some naïve belief that we can erase these latter stories and restore a misplaced sense of past innocence. It’s out of recognition that there are usually things to be learned from other people, and this includes learning from the agrarian localists of the past as we try to build agrarian localisms for the future.
The current story that I think most needs disrupting is the essentially ecomodernist one that the agrarian localist story is a bucolic fantasy, and that what’s needed is high-energy technofixes to the existing global food, energy and urban metabolisms.
Ecomodernism isn’t a firm and fixed doctrine or membership club, but a story with disparate elements. I don’t consider all its purveyors to have honourable intentions, but some of them do – and it seems to me that the more honourable strands are grounded in genuine colonial guilt that nevertheless reproduces colonial structures of power: we built a high-energy, high-capital empire on the back of other people’s unwilling labour, and now we seek to give the benefits of our techno empire to everybody, with an offer they can’t refuse.
I believe this story is gravely mistaken and I’ve invested a lot of effort in trying to disrupt it, which was basically the point of Saying NO… I think it would be better to stop trying to save the world by imposing questionable ‘solutions’ reliant on high-energy, high-capital global tech, and to favour instead more local approaches that are more firmly grounded in politics than technology.
Per René August’s point, grounding responses to the meta-crisis more in politics than in technology means creating stories that can hold us together in this moment. And this is what I want to turn to as I look forward to future work. Some people have criticised the negativity and combativeness of some of my previous writing. That’s probably fair enough. There are fine lines involved in the necessary work of both disrupting problematic stories while trying to build capacious new ones, and I know I haven’t always navigated them well – even as I also think some of these criticisms aren’t well motivated and require me to stand firm.
I don’t have easy answers as to how I might do all this better in future, but I was interested by the ideas of another keynote speaker, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, concerning prayer and embodied communion. To pray, to praise and to forgive – to forgive oneself, also, I think. Not in the sense of giving oneself an easy pass, but in working toward real self-forgiveness. Anyway, the conference gave me much to think about as I contemplate new projects.
Third, as I made my way back from the conference, I got caught up in the crowds at the end of the Pride event in central London, which probably wouldn’t be the kind of thing you’d likely see in the more rural parts of my home patch in Somerset. I’m currently reading Anna Jones’s interesting book Divide, concerning ‘the relationship crisis between town and country’. She, along with other writers and thinkers I’ve encountered recently, has interesting things to say in it about racism and homophobia in the countryside – interesting not least because she’s subtle enough to trace the borderlands between bigotry and rural social conservatism without just lumping them together in condemnation. It’s another ‘no easy answers’ arena in which I’d like to deepen my understanding. For now, I’ll just say that I’m interested in discussions and views about building inclusive and cosmopolitan rural localisms.
Fourth, talking of conservatism, and ruralism – well, here in Britain we have a general election this week in which the ruling Conservatives are widely tipped to be wiped out by the Labour Party. Who knows, but normally at election time when I travel in the countryside I see numerous farmers’ fields with billboards for the Conservatives, and almost never for other parties. This time, I’ve seen none. The farmer vote isn’t going to swing the election, but – to use an appropriately agricultural metaphor – the empty fields could be a straw in the wind for what’s to come.
Normally at election times I write a post that runs the rule over the manifestos of the various parties, but to be honest I lack the enthusiasm this time around. I did start reading the manifestos and got to the bit in the Labour Party’s about the importance of economic growth and Britain’s vital financial services sector when my still-dodgy rural internet connection failed. I’m taking that as a sign. I’ll be delighted to see the back of the present government, but I don’t believe meeting the challenges of the meta-crisis now lie within the ambit of central governments of any variety, and certainly not within Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
But if the Tories indeed are crushed and if a Labour government fails to make much headway with the problems of our times, we might see populist political realignments of various kinds emerging – various kinds of scary and various kinds of promising. I’ll be interested to track this issue in the longer term.
And so (almost) finally to my question for commenters. I’ve been publishing my posts here simultaneously on Substack, and have amassed a nucleus of followers on that platform – including a few who generously pay a subscription, even though all the content currently is free. I’ve turned comments off on Substack, as I don’t really want to manage parallel comment threads. But I quite like the Substack platform and would like to open these posts up for wider comment. If nobody commented I’d probably stop writing them, yet sometimes I feel I lack the time to respond properly when people take the trouble to write a thoughtful comment (I like it when commenters start discussing issues with each other!)
I also wrestle a bit with the whole question of money for writing – overly commodifying it seems wrong, but so does spending so much time on it for so little tangible return while I let endless practical jobs on the holding slide in favour of it. Should I switch over to Substack? Should I open up to Substack comments? Should I offer something more to paid subscribers? Should I earn more, or write less, or just carry on as I am because it’s what I do? My choices of course, but any thoughts welcome.
Finally – I promise! – a heads up on a couple of media offerings. My interview with Henry Leveson-Gower in the Mint Magazine is just out here. And I’ve just come across this excellent critique of food system ecomodernism by ramblinactivist Paul Mobbs, which is worth a watch.
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I went to Ilfracombe on was it the 20th (I think!)
There were a few (non vandalised) Conservative posters the deeper into North Devon we got but putting one of those things up is the equivalent of advertising that you have fleas etc.
My maternal grandfathers family had connections with Yeovil and there was a female relative in the inter war years who rode a motorbike and had no interest in Gentlemen callers, so there were some women living openly different lives in rural areas.
I may have sortof passed you in town on Saturday — though I was neither at St Ethelburga’s nor Pride, but going for a (routine, precautionary, I am perfectly well but have a very strong family history of cancer) mammogram at St Bart’s.
I haven’t personally encountered much bigotry from people who live rurally, though I have from people who live in the suburbs but think of themselves as in opposition to city dwellers. I suspect that much of the current perception of a divide, though rooted in historic power relations, is manufactured by media narratives, and something of a distraction from the divide between those who benefit from neo-liberalism and those who don’t. But I myself don’t live rurally, so my own experience is hardly going to be representative. What I can tell you from my involvement in churches is that saying you want to be inclusive and then doing things that aren’t inclusive will likely lead people to conclude that you were lying about being inclusive, but in a sufficiently hostile environment, *not* being explicit about trying to be inclusive will lead people to conclude that they are not welcome. I tend to err on the side of joyous embrace of things like rainbows and flags, and let the people who have a problem with that exclude themselves, rather than vice versa — but it is not straightforward, especially if you happen to be straight and white and cis and so can’t “prove” inclusivity without a token person of some or other stripe, which is… well, queer people don’t exist for the purpose of proving that straight people aren’t homophobic. (I’m still pretty regularly in the position of walking into churches and only seeing men in leadership positions and wondering — are these particular men supportive of e.g. women being priests? Do they have theological objections but are willing to be civil and respectful with those who disagree? Or are they just misogynists? I’ve encountered all three. I won’t get started here on homophobia in the C of E, or I’ll be here ranting all night.)
The election is just grim. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so unenthusiastic about voting.
The powers served by voting for any of the parties likely to get into government in the UK are the same powers that are served by telling us that all we have to do is wait for green electricity, buy a new (electric) car and put our plastics in the recycling bin; it’s a vote between people who will continue to chase infinite economic increase, at least for themselves and their friends. There were people who fought hard for my right to vote, so I will hold my nose and do it, but I don’t feel like there is anyone I can vote for who would actually make any real difference. So I’ll also go on building what refugia I can.
I think if you will gain a wider audience on Substack as a result of doing so, it is probably worth opening up comments there as well as having them here, though the conversation could get even more repetitive as few people are going to read all the comments in both places (a link at the bottom of the posts here to the equivalent post on Substack would help with that, if it comes to it). It’s certainly worth a trial for a few weeks or months.
Communion, embodiment, forgiveness — there is something I have always found weirdly comforting about the idea of original sin, the idea that no matter how hard I try, I will, as a human being, manage to mess things up and marr the image of the divine in which I am made. Adam’s sin gives me a strange sort of permission to be my imperfect self. I suppose in my case this goes alongside an interpretation of the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ has broken the gates of said place and nobody is required to stay there against their will, which makes my inevitable failure much less terrifying: I have but to repent, to ask for forgiveness and reconciliation, and it will be granted, and this is not something that somehow ends when I die. That doesn’t mean that actions of repentance, of metanoia and changing direction, are unwarranted in this life; rather, getting some practice in now at seeking forgiveness and working for reconciliation seem like a pretty good idea, both for their immediate effects and so that I’ll have some familiarity with the process later on. Nevertheless I am still comforted by the whole thing, which is so often seen by non-Christians as a sort of misanthropic guilt trip. (My interpretation here borders on universalist heresy, and also pre-supposes that hell even exists in the first place despite scant scriptural evidence for it and virtually no accounts from humans who have been there and come back, but… that’s religion for you.)
I personally think putting your words behind a paywall (or offering “something more to paid subscribers” — unless you offer something other than your words, which runs in the direction of either making more work for yourself, commodifying relationships, or both) is a recipe for a particular kind of echo chamber, and brings its own headaches. I’m also the sort of person who would far rather make occasional one-off payments than a recurring subscription, though I would (somewhat grudgingly, as I dislike Substack as a platform) pay one in your case — largely because I’m sure (from having been on the other side of this exact dilemma with choral composing — which I really must find more time for, I haven’t quite worked it into my post-2020 life and goodness knows I could do with the money) that having a regular income has quite a lot to be said for it. Apologies for all the parentheses, it’s late and I am tired.
There are echoes here of conversations around commodity crops vs. self-provisioning; are you writing because you need the money, or because the writing, and the conversation around it, is part of a wider and more complex ecosystem of ideas and relationships, with many intangible or “external” goods not captured by the commodity system? Is a paywall a form of enclosure, where the platform providing the paywall service extracts a rent from you, or can it be more like a sort of commons with particular boundaries? This also needs to be weighed against questions like whether a regular income from writing might make you further neglect practical tasks of self-provisioning and local community-building; it’s hard to say whether writing about agrarian localism is more or less important than the pre-figurative work on the ground where you are, but it feels to me like the latter lends a legitimacy to the former (while also being perfectly legitimate in and of itself). It’s also worth noting that the network effects of platforms such as Substack tend to be a double-edged sword. An awful lot of people are locked into Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever other platform because that’s where the people they actually want to talk to are. My experience is that many platforms go through a sort of succession process ending with a very poor signal:noise ratio, as the attributes that allowed the platform to experience rapid growth and connectivity are less appropriate for a fully saturated system. I don’t know Substack well enough to know about what the technical attributes are, but it’s something to be aware of. On the other hand, surely part of the task of articulating a cosmopolitan and inclusive agrarian localism has to be getting away from certain types of atomisation, including that of only really having conversation on one website that can’t even thread comments properly after a certain number. The whole thing is a conundrum, and I’m sorry if my rather scattered thoughts on it make the way forward less clear rather than more. Truly, we see through a glass darkly…
COLONIALISM: Let’s test this scientifically – mainly because the above accusations has the aroma of too much time in a Sociology think tank – and not enough time in a climate lab. What if we lived on another earth where geology formed differently and this Earth 2.0 NEVER had fossil fuels – but instead the politics of empire were just as messed up as ours. There was a period of Colonialism shooting out on wooden boats – and then a history of colonialism running on renewables and the electric vehicles with started with in the 1910’s – but of course massively accelerated because there was no oil or gas on Earth 2.0.
Whatever horrible political and humanitarian crises existed on Earth 2.0 – would there be a climate crisis?
Or maybe I’m over-tired and struggling with semantics – but if you’re talking about the growth incentives from enormous oil and coal corporations – and how they might behave marching through Africa – isn’t that Neoliberalism? Neo-Corporate-Colonialism?
This is why I’m for the EAF finally Federating – and maybe growing across the AU. If African institutions can come together with some strength, then maybe they can finally have the power to stand up to some of these NeoLib Colonial behaviours and Chinese Colonial behaviours.
YOU SAID IT: You’ve already agreed people are not moving out of the cities where the work is. That the demographic trends are going in exactly the wrong direction, as people urbanise. You admitted the “Small Farm Future” is only going to happen AFTER the collapse of civilisation in some awful climate calamity. That there is no Department of Emergency Relocation. That your ‘solution’ isn’t one – it isn’t working and will not work because no one is doing it.
Basically – haven’t you already agreed that “the agrarian localist story is a bucolic fantasy”?
THE ONLY SOLUTION is what you call “high-energy technofixes to the existing global food, energy and urban metabolisms.” Well – as a fan of New Urbanism and Ecocities – I do believe in “urban metabolisms” – just very different to what we have today. But yes – they are a fantastic way of multiplying efficiencies. The City Size Bonus ads 30% GDP for free every time you double a city’s population.
Energy absolutely is the lifeblood of the modern world – and billions would starve to death if we did not have it. In today’s world. Sure – if we all went Amish we could lower the energy required to feed ourselves. And what fraction of us would be returning to the land to do manual work? Especially as you think our only energy source our there on the land should be horses – which I doubt would have enough fodder to a horse to about 3% of all the farmers?
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/04/bring-back-the-horses/
Did you know they’ve basically hit ‘peak farm horse’ – as most horses today are just not suitable for farm work? It might take generations to breed them up just for that 3% of farmers ratio. See article above.
Finally – don’t rave too hard about Paul Mobbs. He’s a Michaux-ist. I tried to explain it, but he got defensive and absolutely WOULD not look at all the new brands of wind and solar and battery and EV and electric motor and permanent battery tech that DO NOT require ANY rare earths in the Michaux strawman.
He could not admit the “Michaux-defeaters” – the 3 technologies that utterly refute the ridiculous hypothesis that we need 4 WEEKS of luxury NMC batteries to support a renewable grid!
1. HVDC that puts EVERY nation on earth within reach of abundant “Sunshine Belt” solar, negating winter.
2. OFF-RIVER pumped hydro that could supply 100 TIMES the storage we need, negating NMC – and 3. SODIUM-Batteries made from sea-salt and agri-waste (for Hard carbon cathode) in an aluminium case that are 30% cheaper than NMC – maybe more – and so the market will just swing that way for grid storage.
Add to that that Ai keeps inventing new stuff – like permanent magnets with no rare earths, etc etc etc – and one cannot just say “Simon Michaux” to make the Energy Transition just vanish! Indeed – has Simon’s paper passed peer-review yet? Or did it fail – and he’s just not really mentioned it yet?
So basically Mobbs is just another Degrowther struggling to justify his anti-renewables position, scratching around the internet for alt-right renewables sceptics. So much of the Doomer or Degrowther movement seems to be operating on the presuppositions supplied by such a slim few! Talk about an ‘echo-chamber!’
I just hope he doesn’t rave about Mark Mills the way Mike Stasse of “Damn The Matrix” Doomer fame did – that was a real egg-on-face moment for Mike! (Mills is a climate denier, renewables denier, peak oil denier – and is actually just a big oil shill!)
I assume you’re talking to me here, and not Kathryn?
First of all, re colonialism I’m reporting the remarks of a Tibetan environmental activist and a South African pastor whose ancestors were enslaved, and you tell me this has “the aroma of too much time in a Sociology think tank – and not enough time in a climate lab”. I have a big problem with that.
Second, you ask “Basically – haven’t you already agreed that “the agrarian localist story is a bucolic fantasy”?” No, I haven’t. You have a baffling unwillingness or inability to understand or acknowledge what I and others are saying, which is why I’ve largely stopped interacting with you. For all your talk of echo chambers, I do not find interaction with you sufficiently dialogical.
I’ve conceded that the politics around agrarian transitions aren’t looking too promising right now in general. From that inch you take a mile. The politics and many other aspects of energy transitions out of fossil fuels aren’t looking too promising either, and you’ve signally failed to refute that.
In another comment you wrote:
“I love this next mining truck that carries its ore downhill – on regenerative breaking the whole way – and so NEVER needs to be charged. In fact – with this route – it has SURPLUS power to feed back into the grid!
https://www.emobility-engineering.com/electric-truck-mines-own-energy/
It’s not perpetual motion – the ‘recharge’ happens when the big digger dumps the ore in the truck. That ore has weight = energy as the vehicle is slowed on the way down the big hill via the regen breaking. Amazing hey? But oh how oh how will we run the world without oil? I’m afraid that’s Big Oil talking. Don’t fall for it.”
There’s an extraordinary energy illiteracy mixed with casual accusation there.
I dislike the implicitly insulting tone of many of your comments, and as I’ve said before I’m not generally well disposed toward anonymous commenters because anonymity often seems to amplify such tendencies.
I’ll leave it to other commenters to engage with you if they like, but there might come a point when I’ll block you if you continue in this vein. Keep it brief, keep it polite, and try to understand where other people are coming from without the big oil/echo chamber shtick.
…just to add, on reflection the more significant thing to emphasize in respect of René August’s remarks is not so much her ancestry as her point that colonialism and climate change are inextricably linked in the present, in such a way that an excessive focus on energy transition technologies misses what’s driving climate change, and misses what will make such transitions unlikely.
First off, the “people [who] have criticised the negativity and combativeness of some of [your] previous writing” can kiss my firm behind.
I say this as a Canadian; we have a global repuation for excessive politeness, and I run true to type—but, and I mean this in the nicest way, you seem comically British. By that I mean that you clearly strive to be fair, even-handed, and precise in your descriptions. You take pains to represent people well and with balance.
So, I find it painfully clear that those who find you combative are not speaking in good faith.
They are not necessarily bad actors, they may just be liberals, with the usual tone policing. What you see so often with folks like that is they tsk-tsk about your presentation, and wring their hands that If Only You Were Not So Negative!
And then of course, after you contort yourself into a double pretzel they just find another reason to not do anything.
I am finding it very difficult to not swear here, I feel like you have held a comment of mine for profanity in the past. But I would be happy to show them what combative looks like.
Anyhoo….
I would love to hear your thoughts on bigotry in small towns as I am in the process of moving back to the land I grew up on. Today was also “Canada Day” and I went to town wearing my shirt honouring Indigenous deaths due to colonialism and my N95 mask.
Canada has a strong strain of what a friend calls Pinko Rednecks, and I think the neighbours skew along those lines. But last year we had the Trucker Convoy, and there were a few giant pickups with Canada flags on the roads today.
On spirituality…
My wife is a witch, and I am bashfully describing myself as an animist. The neighbour dropped yesterday that his partner is a witch, so that bodes well. So, curious to see where you go with spirituality.
On Substack…
I don’t trust The Man. Wherefore MySpace?
So I think you should maintain your personal website, but I don’t think you should host two comments section, or three including Facebook, or four including Twitter.
So, if you want all the comments on Substack, or on here, I think just tell people where to go and anybody who can’t be bothered isn’t one of your Smaje Superfans, now are they?
Now, I am unemployed, and imagine I might remain that way, as a subsistence farmer making little effort to sell the products of the land. I get an allowance from my wife to keep me in beer and new socks. So I too am allergic to subscriptions—I absolutely hate them. But I too might do it for you because I enjoy your writing so much.
I think we are quite close in our “lack” of spirituality, as well as quite close in the realization that “sacredness” may be a most needed and useful concept and balance to the utilitarian perspectives dominating today. I am increasingly irritated by the way people motivate nature protection or restauration, as if it is only if it is “profitable” that we should protect a species or care for a forest.
I am not sure about the merit in the, often seen and heard, expansion of the meaning of the word colonialism. To apply it also for all sorts of opression or exploitation also within the “colonial” country as well as to anything Western seems misplaced in my view. Why not use another c-word for that?
I certainly agree with the need to come up with postive examples and good stories, but I believe it is equally important to spend energy on critique of the dominating narratives and views. It is also important to actually be/do/live the change. But mostly a person is better at one of the three. It is nothing to be ashamed of. There are certainly some problems with the critical stance, but there are also problems when you discuss alternatives. In order to be “realistic” there is always the risk that you actually end up confirming the existing biases and general perspectives. And if you are not realistic, e.g. be projecting a small far future or a life as a monk, you will not enter the mainstream debate – UNLESS, there is a widespread realization that the current state of affairs is really not sustainable, or even desirable. In order to establish a new “faith” you also need to show why the old one is no longer useful….
I didn’t know you were at Substack. I can understand the desire to earn some money from the writing, I am there as well. I have managed to get 20 paying subscribers in a year. So far I offer the paying lot little extra – apart from access to my books as pdf files, and I believe I will keep it like that. I share Kathryn’s concern about commodifying writing but see no easy way out of that.
As for rural/urban differences, I think a lot of them are fabrications and that many people in the countryside today are as urban as any urbanistas and vice-versa.
I often find it helpful to frame the enclosures in the UK and the land grabs on Turtle Island and the chattel slavery in places with certain cotton or sugarcane crops as part of the same exploitative system.
I appreciate Gunnar’s caution about overuse of colonialism, and Kathryn’s attention to the interconnectedness.
A very important essay on this side of the water is Decolonization is not a metaphor.
The authors lay out the many things that are NOT decolonization.
tl;dr, Decolonization is Land Back.
I think you could assume some corollaries—if there are things that are not decolonization, then there are things that are not colonization, as Gunnar says.
But, in the introduction, Tuck and Yang say, “Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non- white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism.”
And I think it is this entanglement that Kathryn is pointing out.
The essay wraps up with:
We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions – decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics – moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give [decolonization] historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36).
I am glad I am old and I won’t have to live thru the coming disaster . from the corporate backing of the greenies for government subsidies , to lgbt protesting for something they allready have in the west ( you earn respect you can’t demand it ) to politicians stating there will be civil war if they don’t win , to BBC political correspondent calling for the murder of opposition leaders , the world is going to hell in a hand basket !
Off and on topic
https://www.science.org/content/article/gold-mine-century-old-wheat-varieties-could-help-breeders-restore-long-lost-traits
On where and how to publish… your questions about what platforms to use, and where to host comments, and how to finance all this, and what it might be better to do instead have a lot of resonance, Chris. I do a lot of reading about the social and ecological impacts of digital technology. From what I have learned it has become clear that the dilemma you face is a feature, not a bug, of a system which is designed to maximise profit for the platforms by increasing ‘engagement’, when engagement is defined as eyeballs on ‘content’. (For a comment on the position US company Substack takes on Nazi content and how this differs from what is possible on European platforms see https://www.ft.com/content/648ec2c0-d71b-4dc6-af15-56fedc54eb2d)
Since you and your readers seriously want to learn and talk about better ways of producing and providing food, while also ensuring better quality lives for all species, and are not interested in ‘engaging’ with ‘content’, there is a problem with using platforms which are set up to do this. BUT – as you have found – they can and do reach people who might not otherwise have found your writing. BUT – this has come at a cost for you in terms of puzzling over what to do next in terms of where and what to publish and for whom. It starts to look like either spreading yourself too thinly – for free – or more narrowly – for a price.
Meanwhile, is the goal of creating the change we need to see being helped or hindered by dozens of people expressing their views on a variety of platforms which have greater or lesser reach, and no co-ordination? Let alone sense of community (as I feel you have achieved with the SFF blog with its regular commenters).
Big questions, which I am currently thinking about. Will get back to you as soon as I can…
You have already shown that activism is expensive. Now, you have to decide if you live to write or write to live. Or if the answer is neither.
I would be happy to chip in to keep you on the air but I’m not sure that rabble like us could keep you in the style to which you would like to become accustomed. How would you expand your reach ?
“…spending so much time on it for so little tangible return while I let endless practical jobs on the holding slide in favour of it.”
Comment writers can have a similar dilemma (and the pay is worse).
: )
It reminds me of the difference between vocation and avocation. And the differences between paid work and volunteer work, activism, and gifts.
Greg’s comment summed it up for me, more or less.
First off, thanks for the notes from the conference. I think you’re right that there’s a profound spiritual crisis at the root of all the problems facing us. Or: a spiritually healthy culture wouldn’t be doing all the obviously dysfunctional things we do. John Michael Greer once quoted the concept of “crackpot rationalism” (I forget from who), and I think that’s an apt description. It seems to me we as a culture often work fantastically hard and smart for fantastically stupid ends.
Also appreciate the framing of telling new and better stories. Of course the agrarian localist one has a big advantage there, in the sense that it’s actually physically possible. 🙂 As for worries about negativity, I do see the point, but personally I think one book with a negative-ish framing is fine. Since the ecomodernists talk so much about numbers and empiricism, and people in our camp get so many “stop being negative” or “so how are YOU going to feed the world, then?” remarks, I think there’s a lot of value in having a book to cite when we claim that the numbers just don’t add up for their project. Not a fun job, maybe, but I’m grateful you were willing to do it. Besides, as I think I said at the time, IMO the book does a decent job of balancing criticism with telling that better story, even if it is titled “Saying NO”.
When it comes to Substack vs personal site: I’m fond of Substack myself, especially since it provided a refuge for critics of Covid-19 authoritarianism at the height of the censorship. Whether you agree or disagree with their perspectives is immaterial, but IMO Substack performed a valuable service for freedom of speech/press where the mainstream print and social media failed. I guess the choice comes down to whether you trust that the platform won’t be bought out by a megacorp or ends up watered down in other ways. In terms of pure readership growth I think it might be a good idea, especially if you could get the right person to recommend you.
Substack also seems to have a bit of a right-wing bias (unless it’s just the rabbit holes I tend to go down there), so I think your perspective could be useful. I feel like I keep running into writers there who have a reasonable diagnosis of our problems, and who might agree to a large extent with agrarian localism, but who also have a bad habit of defaulting to 1950s-style chest-thumping machismo and/or conservative Christianity. They’re welcome to it if they like, but that’s not my personal cup of tea. Still, some of their readers might be receptive to a better story involving less authoritarian traditionalism and more land reform and small family farms with robust political freedoms.
Personally, I think it’s fine and reasonable to charge a small subscription fee for writing. Many people do a mixture of paid and unpaid posts, and I think that’s a good model too, at least at first. There’s definitely a lot of people on there charging money for essays of much lower quality and scholarship than yours, so I don’t think you’d at all be out of line to charge.
The election…yeah. All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not eligible to vote in it. Hopefully something constructive will come of it, even if it doesn’t look too likely.
Anyway, even if I don’t comment that much I do read every post, and I hope you keep up the good work regardless of platform.
(Not really on-topic for this post, but) @Kathryn re. original sin and Harrowing of Hell: As a non-Christian who’s always found the concept of original sin kind of odious, I do appreciate your alternate take on it as liberating. Still not sure I fully agree, but I can see where you’re coming from. And if we have to have a Hell to begin with, I have to say the idea of Jesus forcing open the gates so everyone can walk out if they want is strangely beautiful in its own way, and of course also works as a metaphor for worldly life with us being free to throw off the self-imposed chains that bind us.
Given the amount of anti-authoritarian stuff I saw online during COVID lockdowns, and also the amount of purely nonsensical “medical” advice, it sure doesn’t feel like censorship is quite what was going on at the time. Perhaps I don’t live in quite such an echo chamber as I’m sometimes accused of! (But now that I wear an elastomeric mask when I’m indoors with people from outside my own household, I no longer get colds; and now that I no longer get three or four crummy colds per year, I no longer need my asthma inhaler. Now that I no longer need my asthma inhaler, my sleep is better and so is my heart health… and somehow, I do not think the people who protested lockdowns and mask mandates will stand up for my right to wear a mask for the preservation of my own health and that of my household. Sigh.)
In fairness, original sin does get presented in some pretty odious ways, very frequently, and I can’t do my usual trick of just blaming Calvin and the other Protestants, because it really predates them. Another perspective on it that I’ve found interesting (but not necessarily convincing) is that the myth of the Fall was a response to how difficult agriculture seemed in comparison to hunting and gathering; the idea being that since we need to do hard labour in order to even survive, humans must have done something Very Bad at some stage. But I think this is a bit simplistic, and that the myths and stories of pre-modern people often have more to them than a simple reading suggests.
The Harrowing of Hell, and the idea of hell as entirely optional (and not through some probably-unattainable route of being perfect while we’re alive, but optional forever — you can go there, decide it’s not for you and then leave) is an uncomfortable one for people who like the concept of wrongdoing being punished; and while I’m not, on the whole, someone who goes in for punitive measures or vengeance, the idea that Stalin or Hitler might *not* be in hell is challenging even for me. But if you get right down to it I don’t think of hell as a physical place at all, but rather as a state of being separate from God and Creation in some way — and heaven as a state of being in reconciliation with God and all of Creation. So there isn’t reward for good actions and punishment for bad, so much as turning toward that which is sacred or turning away, and the consequences of that turning. I find this posture of agency, orientation and relationship more difficult to navigate than just having a straightforward list of rules to follow, but ultimately more hopeful, even if the apparent effect in my life might look the same.
Thanks as ever for a varied and interesting set of comments. Briefly…
#Diversity in the countryside. I agree that there’s quite a bit of media confection around this and that there’s been historic diversity in the countryside, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Gunnar is right that a lot of people in the countryside are very urban … because, well, that’s where they came from. Which has its advantages, but also disadvantages – not on the diversity front but on the agrarian understanding front. Anyway, perhaps more on this at some point.
#Colonialism. As is often the case, we confront the question of whether it’s best to lump or split categories. I think it’s hard to understand European colonialism beyond Europe without understanding its generative history within Europe – in the British case, particularly in relation to Ireland and Scotland, but also in Wales and England.
Then again, maybe there’s a case for splitting the settler colonialism of the USA that’s the focus in the essay Ruben quotes from other kinds of colonialism … does the US case get too much attention in the Anglophone world as compared to, say, India or René August’s South Africa?
Anyway, thanks for those quotations, Ruben. I find them very thought-provoking. On the one hand, yes fair enough – an unfriendly uncoalescing of coalition. But I wonder how much such sentiments implicitly assume a relatively neutral public sphere underwritten (however hypocritically) by a liberal state in a way that looks increasingly unwise to assume (also per Christine’s example of Nazism on Substack here). In the event, heaven forbid, that a US president should be elected on a racist, latter-day settler colonist platform and start unpicking those liberal state structures, I think the unfriendly uncoalescing of such coalitions may start to look a bit counterproductive. Hence I find René August’s more universalist and Christian-based framing potentially more alive to the present moment. But her historical grounding is somewhat different…
Thanks also Ruben for the comically British moniker. I will add that to my bio. And also for the admonition about “kissing my firm behind”. I’ll try that one out the next time I’m at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation.
#Spirituality. Thanks everyone who weighed in on this topic. This is a conversation I’d like to keep alive, whether in its secular, Christian, animist, witchy or other forms. All of these interest me, but I’d certainly welcome some yarning on the subject of animism and witchiness.
#Why do I write. I appreciated hearing everyone’s thoughts about the topic of writing, money and community in this imperfect world. I feel a bit awkward raising it, but I think it’s good to check in with myself and with commenters about this from time to time. Good point from Steve from the commenter’s perspective – why don’t you all pay me, then I’ll cycle the money back to you in accordance with your comments? We could prefigure the circular economy right here at chrissmaje.com.
Anyway, bottom line I think is that I’ll keep things pretty much as they are. I might open up comments on Substack, while prioritising my responses to comments here on this site. Ultimately of course I have to navigate the tension between farming and my compulsion to write by myself, but I’m glad to have heard people’s thoughts about it. There are many causes worthier of support than my personal bank account, but you know where the donate button is…
I do like the possibilities of the ‘note’ function on Substack – that is, a way of distinguishing between longer essays and short communications. Though I suppose I could replicate that here just by using the title ‘Note’ to signal it.
Also, Kathryn mentioned the idea of threading comments deeper. I could probably do that if people would like me to. Personally, I find the comments work okay as they are. Or I suppose there are other options, more discussion board type of things, Reddit etc. I don’t really know anything about those and I’m not sure I want to dive into a whole other platform, but further views are welcome.
I don’t generally struggle too much with the limit on threaded comments, but it does seem to throw some people a bit and I do lose track when they then pick a random comment of mine to attach their reply to instead of the one they’re actually addressing. It clearly isn’t a deal-breaker for those of us who are here. Diving into another platform would need to be more about reaching different people than keeping us happy. Reddit requires active moderation to remain civil; I can’t comment much on other platforms.
As far as spirituality goes I definitely have days when my Christianity leans animist, but it’s not something I have a lot of language for. I can almost hear some wag at the back
pointing out that this hasn’t stopped me before. The best I can do at the moment is to say that genuine respect for deer, trees, rocks and even the very land I tend as fellow creatures isn’t something I was taught by the hegemonic version of vaguely Christian culture I grew up with. Instead it is something I am learning by careful attention. I’ll still put up barriers against deer and talk trash about slugs with any other allotment holder, though, and I feel like the widespread prevalence of usury and war may be a more obvious departure from Christianity than a general reluctance to seek permission from a colony of ants before overturning potato tubs to get at the potatoes. (I did apologise afterward, but I think the ants will be okay. At least it wasn’t the bitey red ones this time, I misplaced my gloves sometime/somewhere on Tuesday so wasn’t wearing any yesterday.)
As a lifelong atheist, I propose aesthetics as a perfectly acceptable substitute for the benefits of animism or any other spiritual sensibility. Wonder and awe at the beauty of the living world are accessible to everyone and allow anyone to be in a “right relationship” with nature (and one’s farm ecosystem).
Aesthetics are subjective, of course, but no more so than religion. And it may be that a propensity for spiritual sensibility and an appreciation for the beauty of nature have both evolved to be innate in the human brain/consciousness. It only takes a some timely exposure and training to fix either one, or both, firmly in any child’s worldview.
I was such a child. Luckily, I got plenty of exposure to nature and farm life as a child and had virtually zero TV “screen time” until I was 10 or 11. Even though my family lived in a small city, it was easy to learn how to appreciate the beauty of life in all its interconnectedness and the kind of landscape in which living things thrive. I missed out on the religion part, but I think I got enough.
I would class wonder and awe as a subset of spirituality rather than aesthetics, but regardless of the terminology I very much welcome any motivation that leads people to tend and care for land and people for their own sake rather than treat them as stock from which to extract maximum profit.
I think Christian hegemony, and particularly Protestant Christian thought, has a lot to answer for in having framed religion and spirituality as being primarily about assent to truth claims rather than, say, the experience of awe, or belonging to a community with a set of practices. Intellectual assent to various truth claims is certainly an approach that seems to work well for some people, but for me (and I suspect for most of us) it’s more complicated than that. I recall “Unapologetic” by Francis Spufford being a worthwhile account of a different sort of approach.
Christian ” hegemony ” has given us the society we live in , and along with many but not all religions has given us civilization , most religions agree on what we call the ten commandments , and that has worked for a millennia , society needs a basic set of rules to live by or there is anarchy , every man and woman for yourself , our western society is now getting a whiff of what its like being without those rules and is becoming a far more dangerous place to be in .
Aesthetics has the benefit that it is quite easily applicable on technology, buildings, factories etc.
Admittedly there is quite some subjectivity in that and people can learn to find also conrete deserts beautiful….
If you want to greatly expand your reach and make a little money too, produce videos for YouTube. Tom Murphy, who has had an excellent blog called Do the Math for almost 15 years, noticed that a video he made got more views in two weeks than his most popular blog posts got in a year.
As for urban rural divide, as I said think there is a lot of fabrication there and that they often just reflect different aspects of the same. This is particularly the case when people start to argue about who is most environmentally friendly.
But when you are farming, not just living in the country-side, some things are really different compared to if you earn your living from something else as part of the Machine. Limits are very obvious and the idea of perpetual growth is clearly absurd in a farming context. I just wrote a piece on that. I guess it is not really anything new for you, Chris, or for the commenters, but nevertheless I post a link here, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/cows-capital-and-growth
As for Nazism on Substack and whether it is good or bad that media platforms censors content, I am firmly in the camp that content shouldn’t be censored, flagged as false or in other ways be moderated by social media platforms. I expand a bit on that here: https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/nazis-moral-panics-censorship-and
The election *was* just grim (written two days after it and five days after CS’s comment).
Labour got 34% and Tories got 24% of the popular vote. The unfair FPTP system magnifies swings either way and enables the media to pretend the ‘winning’ party has strong support.
Put another way, ~17% of the adult population voted Labour and 12% Tory. It’s very low because:
a) Only 60% of registered voters turned out
b) Some adults, maybe 10%, are disillusioned and have found ways to remove themselves from the electoral register.
I walked a total of 4 km to spoil my ballot paper – the first time in 50 years that I haven’t put a X in a box. Good exercise though.
The requirements for photo ID also kept a lot of people from voting.
I did go with “give the Greens half a chance at getting their deposit back” in the end and they came second in my safe Labour seat constituency. I think if we had STV or similar instead it’s very likely we would have a lot more Green MPs — for all the good that would do.
I’ve been saying elsewhere that the wider context is that Western governments have lost the ability to protect their citizens from as many of the negative consequences as they used to of unrestrained financialised extractive colonial global market capitalism. That was always going to cause problems eventually.
The question now is whether Labour tackles some real causes with an eye on long-term local resilience, or kicks the can down the road while laughing all the way to the bank. To do the former they’ll also need to drop the culture war, outgroup-scapegoating nonsense Keir Starmer has been parroting to pander to the right. Doing the latter… well, I can but hope that Labour can-kicking might at least lead to a bit of a break for some people who aren’t rich. The last fourteen years have set an extremely low bar.
I’d vote for an anarcho-socialist agrarian localist on a distributist platform, but they don’t tend to run for office. Ho hum. I allowed myself a day of schadenfreude about the Tories losing their deposits in so many constituencies; now to get back to the real work.
@Barry
To add to your grim assessment of UK politics…….
Labour got less votes than in 2019 under Corbyn.
2019 was Labour’s worst result since the 1930s in terms of seats and yet, this time round less votes but massive majority in parliament.
Enough said.
“unrestrained financialised extractive colonial global market capitalism.”
I suppose Maggie Thatcher started that one with the ” public private partnership ” which is just a fancy way of saying Fachism that labour never reversed and the taxpayers had to subsidise after all the assets were sold off to the merchant bankers .
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/analysis-activist-groups-take-nearly-10-times-much-funding-fossil-fuel
Worth a perusal .
People have said all I would want to say about not using Substack for a variety of reasons. I use another service called Buttondown, which you could use to send out an email of each post. I would also happily offer a donation from time to time here on your site, but I will not subscribe on Substack.